The Great Tower rang once, the deep sound reverberating downwards through miles and miles of haphazard iron architecture, reaching even the deepest reaches of the Bone Pits.

The wolf’s crusted eyes slowly opened at the sound after a moment of straining - much to its own surprise - and for a moment, it simply lay there, unsure of what to do. Its imminent death was something it had seen as a fact, yet now, it felt better than it had in months. Pain still wracked its body, but it was faded, distant. Rather than each breath sapping its willpower with the searing agony of all its wounds, it was just… a mild ache.

Its breaths came easier, its thoughts were clearer, and the countless fleas and ticks that had attached themselves to it seemed to be having a harder time than usual at tormenting it.

Out of curiosity, it shuffled its paws under its chest as best as it could, and pushed.

Besides a tremor running through its weak legs, they surprisingly obeyed. Moving them still felt more like it was commanding straining tendons rather than even a single shred of muscle, but it walked on regardless, confused yet cautiously optimistic at the sudden improvements it felt.

For a while, it simply followed the sound of night-life with its single functioning ear, hoping that it would run into some half-rotten garbage that no two-legger would eat. Odd barks, strangle grumbles and melodious howls littered the more open and lively areas, dozens of two-leggers packed tight in buildings reeking of both poison and food at once.

Then, out of the corner of its eye, it spotted a flicker of movement in the shadows of an alley to its right. Barely wide enough for a two-legger to walk through comfortably, looming metal walls on both sides, and about as long as two two-leggers were tall. It seemed to be little more than an architectural mistake, in the corner of which was a tiny dark spot on the ground that moved and twitched with movements so small it was nigh imperceptible.

It stopped, its ear straightening as it tilted its head.

Deciding that something that was so much smaller than even itself might be a good prey, it cautiously stalked forward, lowering its head and going even slower than it already had. The shadow of the sphere-lights outside receded as the darkness embraced its gaunt form.

Only a couple meters away now from the small dark mass on the ground, the wolf recognized a familiar scene, one that it had many scraps with other strays over when it had woken up in the pits for the first time, having no memories of anything but basic concepts and definitions in its head.

A mouse lay dead against the wall, the front half of its body half-eaten by a small group of armored six-leggers, each roughly one-fifth the size of the mouse itself.

Perhaps due to its extremely cautious approach, or perhaps because the mouse was in a corner, none of the armored six-leggers noticed it approaching, too busy with their meal.

After a few seconds of judging distance and risk, the wolf experimentally opened its jaws, stretching them as wide as it could. It tilted its head a bit to judge how difficult it would be to down the mouse and the six-leggers in one chomp.

Maybe risky, but definitely possible.

The appearance of the six-leggers tickled at the back of its mind, and a word for them begged to be drawn out of the abyss.

The wolf ignored it, crouching low on shaky legs and prowling closer and closer, until a single lunge would be enough. It cared not for the minutes that passed, or the rapidly decreasing mass of the mouse being speedily devoured by the six-leggers.

Coiling its abused tendons and ordering its lethargic muscles to life, it lunged with an audible snap.

Teeth scraped against stone for a moment, before they closed around its prey. An instinct in the back of its mind told it to shake its head, one which it suppressed, fairly certain its fuzzy mind would be unable to handle it and make it disoriented like last time.

So, it simply clamped its jaws as tight as it could, observing the singular six-legger that managed to escape scuttle away into a hole in the stone, the rest squished into a blob of gore with the mouse in its teeth.

Then its eyes rose and gazed upon the dead end in front of it, and fear coiled low in its gut as it realized that there would be no escape if something cornered it.

With as speedy steps as it could manage - which weren’t speedy whatsoever - it retreated back to the street as it snapped its head back and ate, keeping its head tilted sideways to have a single eye on the entrance of the cramped alley.

Thankfully, nothing blocked its exit, and after a few moments of cautiously walking away from the scene, its tail hesitantly wagged just a bit.

It was utterly exhausted, both mentally and physically, and it was still horribly hungry.

But it felt like it had a chance. One of those giant rats might be too dangerous a prey to be worth the fight, but if it could move, it could scrape together enough food to keep going.

Instinctually, it knew that even its meager recent snacks should have filled its tiny stomach, but for some reason, it felt ravenous. It was a strange hunger, neither purely physical nor purely mental, some odd mix of the two, yet the wolf was familiar with hunger, refusing the odd, risky urges its empty stomach pushed towards it.

Attacking a two-legger - staggering and stumbling or not - was a terrible idea.

As it wandered around, looking for a half-decent place to sleep, it had to stop and retreat increasingly often from incoming two-leggers, or squish against a wall as they passed, ready to bolt if they shifted their stance towards it. While some of those creatures had tossed scraps of edible food before, most two-leggers either stared it down with a strange, contorted expression that couldn’t have been anything good, and a few outright tried to chase it out of their territory. Yet when the entire world was their nest, there wasn’t really anywhere safe it could go without any two-leggers around.

All the places that were devoid of two-leggers were full of brown-green toxic waste and the equally dangerous animals that gathered around such places. So it took the route of least danger, trying to seem as small as possible as two-leggers made noises at each other and mostly ignored it.

Many times over its short life it had heard certain sounds be uttered by the two-leggers as they looked at either itself, or some other kin. ‘Mutt’, ‘fleabag’, ‘stray’ were the most oftenly repeated words, yet try as it might, it couldn’t recreate them, nor understand why they used such complex and differing noises to alert each other to the presence of canines.

All of a sudden, a realization struck the wolf.

It was ever since it had seen… or more accurately, felt that odd dream of ideas, thoughts and concepts yesterday, that it knew what it was. That it was different. The others of its kin were by all accounts very similar in build beyond some small differences, but somehow it knew that it was a wolf now, while the others were… something close, but not the same.

Somehow, they knew as well, or so it would seem as it looked back on their interactions. It would explain many things the little wolf had sat and wondered about when it was resting but unable to sleep, either due to a cacophony of machinery, or due to pain.

Many times had it tried to ingrain itself into a pack, only to be chased out without a reason. One sniff was all it took for a curious kin to turn flighty and avoid it entirely, if not outright snarl and snap at it while retreating, as if the wolf was about to try and eat it whole, despite the obvious size difference between the teenage pup and full grown canines.

Yet try as it might, it couldn’t detect whatever it was the other canines had smelled on it, besides the usual filth.

Now, it finally had an idea as to why all its look-alikes recoiled at its presence.

It simply did not belong. It was alone. It always was, its few understandings of social interactions and the world observed from afar, learned or remembered through unknown avenues, or inferred from base instincts, but the realization that it wasn’t just unaccompanied, but well and truly alone, the only one of its kind in the small world it knew of, that realization made its steps slow, until it was simply standing in place, dazed.

A deep sense of loneliness made its chest tight, and hazy memories of sleeping in a pile with other wolf cubs were brought to the forefront of its mind. The feeling of warm kin against its fur, their breath tickling its ears, the rise and fall of their chests synching up as if they were all one single entity, the warm feeling of contentment.

It never knew where those dreams came from, as all it had ever known were these streets, bridges, alleys and sewers. But they felt real, and many times they’d comforted it when its mind was trying to soothe its worries over the encroaching clutches of death.

Its tail drooped low, and it resumed its wandering with low spirits, keeping an eye out for a decent place to sleep, or any lucky scraps of food. Many alcoves, corners and safe-seeming spots were mentally noted, yet most were too close to barrels of chemicals, pulleys or various bits of moving metal. All things that it had learned not to trust after it had almost lost its tail when it fell asleep on a gargantuan gear that started moving.

Much time passed, two-legger figures clothed in brown and various shades of gray hurriedly moving past and around it, their body language tense and weary. The wolf didn’t react to them too much, simply making sure to keep its eyes on errant pipes just in case the two-leggers were being cautious because something was about to break. Two-leggers were usually only scared of other two-leggers, and rarely ever bothered with the wolf, so it simply trudged past them. As long as they weren’t looking at it, two-leggers were more concerned with… whatever two-leggers did.

Its steps slowed, and its parched mouth begged for water, but it continued, ducking into smaller alleys in the hopes of finding a safe spot to sleep in where rats and mice couldn’t find it and try to nibble on it. Even if it wasn’t that sleepy at the moment, walking while digesting food felt oddly uncomfortable.

An idea popped into its head and was almost immediately discarded. It could try to bait the rodents by pretending to be asleep for another quick snack, but it simply didn’t have the energy to pretend. The moment it closed its eyes for more than a minute, it would probably fall asleep and wake up with another giant rat trying to chew through its fur like last time, and that just wasn’t a fight it wanted to take.

Although… maybe it could just… sleep in the open? Two-leggers hated rats and mice, and actively went out of their way to kill them. While the feeling of being exposed was-

The wolf’s train of thought faded away as it walked out of the alleyway, noticed the sudden lack of walls around it from the corner of its eyes, and froze with its paw mid-air as soon as it raised its head, eyes wide open.

In front of it was the largest open space it had ever seen, stretching on for hundreds of meters in every direction. Hundreds upon hundreds of two-leggers were flecked throughout the massive crescent-shaped open area, somehow looking like a small number by comparison to the sheer amount of space on display, little more than moving dots from its position. The wolf craned its neck upwards, for the first time feeling its eyes actually strain to make out the details of the countless black lines, towers, latticework bridges and elevation platforms covering the open area like an unintentional dome of mind-boggling complexity and scale.

Giant sphere-lights were connected to thin metal towers that punched through the crescent metal platform, and reached up to the bridges and walkways above, seemingly created for the sole purpose of lighting and connecting various hanging wires from one place to the next. A metal rail framed the platform’s edge to prevent two-leggers from falling into whatever was below, and dozens of small structures were dotted throughout the gargantuan area, with bright signs covered in odd shapes. Two-leggers would walk to those odd structures with a half-open front, gibber at each other for a bit, then be given things to carry away, either in bags or directly placed on their back-pouches.

The things they were given varied wildly from odd, glowy things made of tiny bits of metal somehow stuck together, to long, sharp metal claws, oval shaped glass bulbs with glowing liquids inside, metal containers with caps on the top, incomprehensible tiny bits of metal, and there was one especially large and sturdy-looking building that seemed to give out nothing but dried… green… somethings. They looked oddly organic and familiar, but it had never seen anything quite like them before.

Its first thought was that the two-leggers might be making a new nest as it finally let its paw hit the metal underneath, tail involuntarily wagging in excitement as it gazed around an entirely different world in wonder.

The streets and alleys it knew were all so… small, all of a sudden. All the miles and miles of snaking tunnels, toxic waste pits, alleys and bridges and factories, all of them now seemed like only a tiny part of a bigger whole. One so big that it was almost scary to imagine.

To the wolf’s right, the metal crescent abruptly stopped at a certain point, cobbled stone replacing it with giant streets that were twice to thrice as wide and multiple times as long as those it was used to traversing through. In a daze, it walked forth, eyes drinking in every detail it could.

Even something as simple as the streets that led to the platform were so foreign to it. Whereas below they were uneven, cobblestoned lines like snakes that changed width with every few steps, moving in dizzying spirals and the occasional, rare straight line in between, the roads here were perfectly straight between the buildings framing them on either side, smooth and flat and completely straight; almost blocky.

The two-leggers were more varied as well. More colors adorned their odd coverings, their gait was more certain, less wary than it was used to.

Without even realizing, its tail had started to wag like crazy as it moved skeletal legs fueled by nothing but excitement, staring in complete disbelief at the colossal tower that the crescent platform was framing.

Its eyes felt like they were burning just trying to open wide enough to see the whole thing from one end to the other, even from more than a hundred meters away.

It watched through the iron framing and glass as its innards shifted, lowering a giant platform to the level above them, before a bridge extended outwards to connect to the level above. Even further above, another platform performed a similar action, barely visible through the smog.

Some kind of… transportation structure? Or maybe it was building stuff?

As if the world was reprimanding it for admiring something made by its betters, a two-legger chose that exact moment to let its eyes wander to the wolf from where he was talking to one of the shopkeepers, an expression of disgust taking up his face. It raised a finger towards the wolf, who’s eyes were still nailed to the tower in wonder.

“[Spark Bolt].”

If it weren’t for the sound of continuous, deafening pops that accompanied the spell, the wolf wouldn’t have had enough warning to instinctually dart forward and to the side away from the loud noise, its weak legs buckling the second it tried to lower its stance and stop its momentum, making it yelp as it tumbled to the ground in a heap of tangled limbs.

After a moment of panicked flailing, the wolf scrambled to its feet and dashed back to the alley it’d come from with a hurried glance back at the man who shot the spell, leaving behind a surprised pyromancer and an irate shopkeeper.

“Are you stupid, kid?! No fuckin’ magic in the market!” A voice barked behind it.

Familiar alleys welcomed it, and after fifteen or so seconds of running, it turned its head to see if it was safe. Seeing nothing following it, it wheezed and coughed through still-burnt lungs, before stumbling to a dented iron crate sitting discarded in a corner. No sooner had its shoulder touched it did its limbs crumple like wet paper, asleep before it even hit the cobblestones.